


Follow the Leader

by Manajerk



Category: Dr. STONE (Anime), Dr. STONE (Manga)
Genre: Denial of Feelings, Embarrassment, First Crush, Gegma - Freeform, Humor, Light Angst, M/M, Magma POV, POV Third Person Limited, Teasing, Trolling
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-01-05
Updated: 2020-01-05
Packaged: 2021-02-27 06:27:03
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,087
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/22132510
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Manajerk/pseuds/Manajerk
Summary: Magma is sulking around after Senku became chief. Gen arrives to cheer him up, but as usual, the "sorcerer" has a few tricks up his sleeve...
Relationships: Asagiri Gen/Magma, Asagiri Gen/Magma (Dr. STONE)
Comments: 6
Kudos: 32





	Follow the Leader

**Author's Note:**

> Gen/Magma is called Gegma and it is real

As everyone was celebrating Senku’s victory in the village games and his crowning as the new chief, Magma had snuck away to the outskirts of the village for some time alone. He was sure someone would notice that he was gone, as his usual strong presence made any absence glaring, but he didn’t care. His clothes were wrecked due to the stunt of Chrome and that strange sorcerer with the two-toned hair, that other dweeby sorcerer was now chief, and Magma’s one goal in life had evaporated in what felt like the blink of an eye.

Now, Magma was sulking alone— sitting on a rock, looking down at the ground, stomping his foot every so often in frustration. He felt something wet on his face. He touched his cheek and soon realized that it was a tear— he must have just gotten a bit of dust or something in his eye, he consoled himself. The strongest man in Ishigami Village did not cry.

Just his luck, of course, someone had to come upon him at that moment.

“Why there you are, Magma-chan!”

The shrill chirp forced Magma to look up at the disruptor of his private tantrum. It was none other than that accursed sorcerer with the black-and-white hair— the bastard responsible for Magma’s failure to become chief, he was the last person the brooding man wanted to see right now.

“What the hell do you want, sorcerer?” Magma snapped, “Are you just here to mock me? To gloat about how your wimpy little friend became the village chief instead of me? To kill me with some crazy spell of yours?”

“Oh please, first of all, my name is Asagiri Gen. I’m surprised you’d forget it, I consider myself rather memorable, and everyone else in the village seems to agree with me on that,” the sorcerer cajoled, “Secondly, I’m not that cruel, I’m just here to…”

He trailed off, as if he noticed something that had distracted him from his train of thought.

“You’re just here to what?” Magma prompted, trying to get the conversation back on track, in a desperate hope that whatever was going on here could be done with quickly and that he could be left alone again.

Gen ignored Magma’s question.

“Are those tears on your face Magma-chan? Were you _crying_?” the sorcerer asked, with such a dramatically pitying tone that it was difficult to tell how sincere he was.

Magma huffed. Clearly, Gen was here to mock him, despite insisting otherwise.

“It’s just dusty around here, that’s all. Now go away.”

“Mm-hmmm,” he hummed, skeptical of Magma’s contention. Gen flamboyantly pulled a rag out of his right sleeve— yet another act of magic, Magma noted— and offered it to the crying man.

“Here, use this to dry your eyes.”

Magma grumbled.

“Trust me, it’s just a regular piece of cloth. In the old world, we sometimes called these sorts of things ‘handkerchiefs’”

Magma tentatively took the rag and roughly wiped his eyes and cheeks. There was a pause. Gen gazed at Magma intensely, and he felt as though the mentalist was gazing into his soul, expecting him to say or do something.

After a slightly unnaturally long time, Gen blinked. “Well then…”

Magma interrupted.

“Thank you,” he declared brusquely, quickly glancing at the rag in his hand, “for this.”

“You’re welcome,” Gen beamed, “Now, about what I was here for…”

The other man took a deep breath, dreading what would come next.

“I just wanted to ask you, to make a vow. A vow to not bother Senku or Chrome or Kinro or Kohaku or any of the others the way you did during the Village Games.”

Magma was about to object, but Gen continued speaking before he could.

“After all, you do remember that I put a curse on you. I could stop your heart at any moment, if I wanted to. Of course, I don’t really want to do that, you’d have to do something really bad to warrant that. But I could still cause you a lot of trouble if you were to make things messy for the others.”

Gen flashed a big smile, trying to evoke a bizarre friendliness that contrasted with his threat. For the first time, Magma took notice of the scar on Gen’s left cheek— it resembled a set of jaws, and he swore, that when the sorcerer smiled, the scar almost seemed like it was grinning mischievously with him.

Magma had never been so vigilant before, and wondered what had suddenly made him like this. He started to sweat, his heart beating slightly faster. Surely, a sign of the spell still being in place. The strongest man in Ishigami Village did not feel fear. There was a part of him that wished the sorcerer would just kill him now so that he wouldn’t have to live with the shame of his failure any longer— death was always the quickest solution to him, after all.

“So you are indeed here to humiliate me,” Magma intoned bitterly, “why don’t you just kill me? It would be less painful—“ he remembered how he had first encountered Gen “— and it would make things even between us.”

“I could do that,” Gen mused, “But would you really want that? Think of all the people in the village who would miss you. I mean, I’ve heard no one is as great a hunter as you are! And what if Senku-chan turned out to be a terrible chief… wouldn’t you want to stand up to him, then?”

The words persuaded Magma easily.

“You’re right, I don’t think I’d want to die…… I’m just mad about all this. It’s impossible for me to feel shittier than I do right now so throw whatever you got at me.”

Gen briefly glanced at Magma in an almost sympathetic way, then returned to his usual chipper tone.

“Alright… then it’s time for you to say the vow,” Gen declared, “Now stand up.”

Magma quickly followed his order.

“Put your hand on your heart, and then repeat after me,” Gen ordered,“I solemnly swear…”

_“I solemnly swear…”_

“With every bone in my body…”

_“With every bone in my body…”_

“To not hinder the progress…”

_“To not hinder the progress…”_

“Of Senku-chan’s plans…”

_“Of Senku-ch— Senku’s plans…”_

This whole ritual was demeaning enough, and there was no way Magma would use cutesy terms of endearment for his enemy.

“And to not interfere with Senku-chan’s friends and allies…”

_“And to not interfere with Senku’s friends and allies…”_

“I must be a good boy,”

_“I must be a good boy,”_

Magma could feel his face heating up now. This really was embarrassing.Gen seemed to pay no mind to Magma’s expression.

“Or else, I will pay dearly for it…” he went on.

_“Or else, I will pay dearly for it…”_

“With a fitting punishment of Gen-sama’s choosing…”

_“With a fitting punishment of Gen-sama’s choosing…”_

“Excellent!” Gen cheered, “You’re done with the vow,”

Magma exhaled in relief.

“Now, you must seal it…” he continued.

“Seal it?” Magma asked.

“Yes,” the sorcerer affirmed, putting his hands together authoritatively. “Kneel before me,” he commanded.

Magma rapidly got on one knee. He felt almost as though his body was moving on his own. If Magma knew what puppets were, he would likely have compared the feeling to being a marionette, with Gen has his puppeteer.

“Now, kiss my foot…”

“Kiss your foot?!” the kneeling man gasped.

“Well, you tried to make Kinro-chan lick your shoe so it’s only fair,” Gen laughed.

Magma could not refute that point, much to his dismay. He grumbled, but slowly started bending down in order to abide by the request, as he didn’t want to suffer whatever worse fate Gen had in store for him if he didn’t obey.

He looked down, consciously noticing for the first time that the man standing before him was barefoot. Magma wondered how and why the sorcerer walked around without any shoes on— surely, that would be painful to any ordinary person. But of course, he remembered, Gen was no ordinary person. He was a sorcerer, from a far off place and a far off time.

Though Gen appeared skinny and feeble, he was capable of surviving the most brutal of attacks unscathed and could kill people with just one glance. Even his appearance evoked his otherworldly nature. His hair was black on one side but white on the other, and there was that tooth-like jagged scar on one cheek. He wore an elaborate unusually-coloured layered robe with billowing sleeves, that contrasted with the simple outfits of the Ishigami Villagers. Gen used his robes to hide mystical talismans and tools— Magma had no idea how the sorcerer managed to pull the rag out of his sleeve earlier or create those flower petals during the tournament. He wondered if Gen could perhaps summon items from another realm. 

Indeed, the mysterious man possessed an immense amount of power. Gen could stop Magma’s heart at his whim and had brought him, the supposed strongest man of Ishigami Village, to his knees. He realized that he had met his match. He had now lost his position as the strongest man in the village— which, to Magma, was basically strongest man in the world, as he was certain there were no living humans outside the village, only wilderness and stone. His heart was beating faster than before and his head was spinning. He had never felt whatever this feeling was in his life before. It terrified him, but also, strangely enough, excited him.

Before Magma’s lips could reach their target, Gen interrupted him.

“Actually, never mind, kissing my foot is too… uh, powerful a sealing method for this sort of ritual. You can kiss my hand instead.”

Gen put out his left hand and Magma held onto it. Gen’s hand was bigger than he had expected, his fingers were long and knobbly, and his skin a bit rough to touch. Slightly surprised by its appearance, Magma ended up looking at it almost in a daze.

“Hmph, why are you staring at my hand— are you going to kiss it and seal that vow or not?” the standing man chided.

Words flowed out of Magma’s mouth without him thinking. “Your hand looks, different than I expected,”

“What were you expecting?” Gen seemed unusually miffed, “That I actually had claws or tentacles or something instead of hands like you and everyone else in this village? I don’t see how you could be foolish enough to think that, Magma-chan. You’ve certainly caught at least a few glimpses of my hands by now.”

“No, nothing like that,” Magma tried to assure, “I just, only caught brief glimpses of them because I’ve only seen you like, twice, and stupid details of your appearance didn’t matter at all. And anyways, you’re always hiding your hands or waving them about doing weird wizard things.”

“But you were certainly expecting something different,” Gen prodded.

“Well—“

“Could it be, you expected my hands to be smaller? Softer? More delicate?”

Magma gulped. While he had never consciously imagined what exactly the sorcerer’s hands looked like before, Gen’s words evoked a vision of a pair of hands in his mind that did seem to fit the sorcerer better than the actual pair of hands before him.

“Do my hands disgust you?” Gen chuckled sharply. There was a tinge of vulnerability in the way he said that. Magma was not sure if it was genuine or just an act to disconcert him. Regardless of the sincerity, Magma did not want to displease Gen, insisting that it was simply because he feared the consequences of what could happen if he did, and not because he was sympathetic towards the other man in any way. And truth be told, he was not disgusted by Gen’s hands in the slightest. Magma’s own hands were the exact opposite of small and delicate, and most Ishigami Villagers had rough, callused hands due to the hard work they had to do. If anything, Gen’s hands hinted at some sort of humanity, that even he could have blemishes.

“No, they don’t,” Magma finally asserted.

“So then what are you waiting for?” Gen pressed, “Kiss my hand.”

Magma swiftly bent down and kissed the back of Gen’s hand gently. This was not out of any sort of tender impulse, he told himself, but just because he wanted get this ordeal over with.

As soon as the quick kiss was done and Magma let go of Gen’s hand, Gen placed it on Magma’s shoulder.

“Wow, I can’t believe you can be such a gentleman,” he gushed cutely, “If you were like this all the time, girls would always be after you. I bet you could have even won Ruri-chan’s heart!”

Magma got a bit flustered by this statement. No one had said something like that to him before, and while it was a compliment he would’ve never quite expected, he was always a sucker for praise (even if it was a little bit backhanded). Being how he was, he didn’t respond with “Aw thanks, I’ve never heard that one before”— admitting that any particular compliment touched him or that there was a nice thing out there that someone hadn’t yet said about him would be too humbling. Instead, Magma briskly brushed Gen’s hand off his shoulder, stood up, and dusted off his knees.

“I don’t care about winning any girl’s heart,” he said, “I only wanted to be chief, which meant that I had to be married to Ruri. At least, that’s what I thought, but it seems your little friend managed to get out of the marriage.”

“Ruri-chan was only a means to an end for you?” Gen asked, having now regained his full composure.

“You could put it like that.”

“So she was only an object, a trophy if you will, and not a person, essentially. After all, you seemed to not care if she died, or perhaps even wanted—“

“Don’t say it like that!” Magma insisted, even though he knew on some level that was true, “I didn’t really want her to die, I mean, I don’t think it would have been a great thing. We might not have been able to have kids if that happened and it’s important for the chief to produce an heir. It’s just that, she would have become a burden to all of us. Her existence would have been pathetic. Perhaps, it would have been better if she was put out of her misery, if she didn’t die from illness quick enough…..”

“But Senku-chan found another way,” Gen reminded him, “He managed to cure Ruri-chan and didn’t have to stay married to her, and everyone was fine with that…”

“Must you mention that pest now?” Magma griped.

Gen didn’t address Magma’s complaint.

“Really, the others seemed to believe in Senku-chan… why didn’t you? Were you to proud? To confident in the usual ways? To afraid of the unknown?”

The honest answer to all those questions was “yes”, Magma knew. But he was always prideful, and would not confess that.

“Why should I have trusted him?” he spat, “How could I have known that he wasn’t telling lies, trying to lead the village astray and then somehow enslave us or something?”

“But wouldn’t you have _wanted_ to believe there was another way?”

Magma wasn’t sure. However, he couldn’t admit that he didn’t know what he wanted. He was used to always knowing what he wanted.

“Well, what I want doesn’t matter, what matters is what’s best for the village,” he said insincerely. That was an obvious lie. Magma was usually one to prioritize what he wanted above all else. Of course, he had also always figured what he wanted to do was what best for the village— it had never quite occurred to him until now that it wasn’t.

Gen raised an eyebrow, not buying Magma’s fib.

There was silence.

“You know,” Gen trilled cheerfully, trying to change the tone of the conversation for some reason that Magma could not quite discern yet, “There were so many more opportunities in the old world. A man could become powerful without being married to anyone, or he could even be married to a man…”

The last part caused an odd image to flash through Magma’s mind— an image of him and Gen in traditional Ishigami village wedding garb. That was certainly nothing, he insisted to himself, just a silly passing thought that came about because Gen was the one telling him nonsensical things about men marrying other men.

“A man married to a man?” Magma laughed, trying to hide any awkwardness that could have been caused by his recent thought, “Now that’s ridiculous.”

“Oh, I knew you would say that!” giggled Gen, “There were so many things that we had in those times that you can’t even imagine! But I’m sure Senku-chan will be able to make them all into realities once again!”

Of course, Magma realized, this was some ploy to get him to trust that stupid other sorcerer. Still, there was some sort of allure to the possibility of him being able to actualize himself in ways that were different than he had considered before. Not the men marrying men part particularly, that really was absurd, he thought, but certainly, it made him a little bit happy that he could perhaps be someone in the society who was as important, nay, _more_ important than that Senku, without being the village chief.

“That sounds great, doesn’t it?” said Gen with a lively tone.

Magma, being his usual arrogant self, did not yet want to openly concede that Gen, and by extension Senku, could have valid points. He still had to express some skepticism.

“If you say so…”

Gen clapped. “I’m glad you’ve opened your heart!, Magma-chan” he bubbled, “Now let’s head back…”

“Really, it’s fine, you can go back without—“

“Please? A lot of people were looking for you!”

“No I—“

“Pretty please? Pretty please with a cherry on top?” 

Magma wanted to protest further, but saw that Gen was giving him a look that brought to mind a helpless baby animal, and even he couldn’t say no to that.

“Fine,” he sighed, “I’ll come back.”

“Yay!” Gen exclaimed. He grabbed Magma’s hand and started to drag him back to the village. Magma once again felt Gen’s hand. But this time, his first thought was not that it was large or callused or bumpy. It was that his hand was warm.

**Author's Note:**

> I've been in the Dr. STONE fandom for a few months now but this is my first fic... you can follow me on my dr stone blog at https://sengens.tumblr.com/ (yes I like sengen too) or on twitter @ lemonenes.


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